A new sheaf of documents declassified by the National Security Archive has revealed that the American government gave serious thought to the idea of hiding the US nukes in Iceland. The plan for a storage area for the nuclear weapons was proposed in 1950’s.
The story gets better when you get to the part where the US government decided to keep Iceland in the dark and not tell her anything about the nuke depot. Albeit the absence of any evidence suggesting the installation or storage of nuclear weapons in Iceland by the US government, with or without informing her, a series of recently publicised telegrams and State Department Staff summaries shows that Iceland was very concerned about the nuclear deployment by the US government during the Cold War era.
The telegrams reveal that the Iceland government was reassured that the US officials would never deploy nuclear weapons in the country. However, the State Department expressed its concerns that their pronouncement will only serve to satisfy the Soviets.
In spite of reassurances, the US government continued to plan a nuke storage in Iceland, if need be. Iceland threatened to exit NATO if a nuclear storage was discovered on their land.
A staff summary dated June 1960 points out that Iceland will not be happy if it gets wind of nukes stored on her soil without her consent. It was only reluctantly that the Americans acknowledged the futility of their plan for a secret nuclear weapons storage facility in Iceland.
You can find more at the National Security Archive about the covert US operations to establish a nuclear storage facility under the radar.
